


Will you ask to live?

by sprx77



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Naruto
Genre: AKA an airbender, But it's A:TLA, But that's okay because we have ao3, Even if she's only just mentioned, Every time I write Hinata I fall more and more in love with her, F/F, First Kiss, Hyuuga Hinata is the Avatar, If only she had been in Steven Universe instead, Metal bender Tenten is my lifesblood, Purple Prose, Sapphic September 2019, Sapphic September Bingo 2019 (Naruto), Short One Shot, Short but good, Slice of Life, So she could be unapologetically gay, Temari is a Sandbender, We were robbed of so many lesbians, in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 11:14:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20873270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprx77/pseuds/sprx77
Summary: Hinata was born a water bender, so she rises with the moon. She must have risen with the sun once, at some point—or several. All the firebenders she had been, breathing with her lungs, now waiting behind her chest and manifest only as flashes of loyalty, wisps of dragon instinct embers aloft on her soul, waiting to catch.





	Will you ask to live?

Hinata was born a water bender, so she rises with the moon. She must have risen with the sun once, at some point—or several. All the firebenders she had been, breathing with her lungs, now waiting behind her chest and manifest only as flashes of loyalty, wisps of dragon instinct embers aloft on her soul, waiting to catch.

She passes Sakura on her way to the cliff’s edge, high enough that it’s like walking on clouds to the sunset itself, close enough to touch. They were high enough that it was like a lake of painted fire dipping down around them and the cliff, the shore. The bastard daughter of the fire nation’s rightful heir turned toward her in silence, all the hues of a rose in bloom.

She smiled, a cut of steel glinting firelight, the unsheathed knife whet by a lifetime in the firelord’s court, tempered by so many reflexive betrayals that even now her eyes remained green rubies, untouched.

Hinata couldn’t blame her; Sakura had been cut by other ornate court knives so many times she couldn’t feel it anymore.

At Hinata’s soft murmured greeting, the dead smile fell away, replaced with something painfully, but truthfully neutral—except, her eyes unthawed around the edges, spring grass sprouting slowly through the sun-warmed ice.

A few minutes later quiet footfalls sounded, the soft careful pads of feet used to shifting sands, but Hinata had cut her teeth hyperfocused on hearing the slightest shift in the ice, the tiny whispered crack that promised certain death—and she could hear it over every word of the furious, loquacious sea.

“She’s more comfortable around us.” Temari noted as she approached.

Yes, she was. Nothing like the tense frame of two weeks ago, a line cast and pulled far too taught. Though it would hold to time, it would break to the sudden enough lurch of the hooked fish, or the mildest wind turning the boat an inch too far in one direction. Without some slack-- the wiggle room to absorb impact—the line would snap under the lightest touch of a guided knife.

It had also been why they’d carefully avoided too much gentleness with her: she could weather every old stress as she always had, but that soft touch would break her.

“Or more comfortable with herself.” She offered, quiet against the burning sky.

“That, too.” Temari settled next to her at the edge of the world. “What are you thinking about?”

Hinata could feel the ocean a mile below, crashing against the cliffs and retreating in a dance older than the four nations. She had been around for it, even if she didn’t remember right now—even if she’d woken with the sun as a firebender, or came awake with the warming earth come noon.

“When do airbenders get up?” Hinata answered, unable to chase the truth through her lineage. Each incarnation had to learn everything anew, even something so fundamental.

Temari looked out at the clouds around them with grey eyes dyed orange. She hummed.

“The air nomads…” She trailed off. “Air is the element of freedom. The air nomads wanted detachment from the world and its distractions, but ended up also cutting themselves off from a lot of its beauty, and struggles, and triumphs. They abandoned many of the things that make life painful, but all of the things that make it worth it.”

The blonde’s voice quieted toward the end, and she sighed, tilting her head back to see the sky—though of course the sky was all around. Hinata could appreciate how the environment affected the airbender—being surrounded by your element was _right_ in a primal, unspeakably profound way.

But Temari’s conflict about the temple dwellers was not unknown to her.

Her people, yes. Victim’s of a genocide, yes. Temari wasn’t an air nomad, though. She was an air _bender_.

Yangchen and others like her had lived fiercely and lived well without the temples that closed off to the world, and that was relatively _recent_—her most recent air incarnation, in fact, prior to the boy in the ice.

The boy who had breathed so shallowly in his sleep for ninety years. Hinata rubbed her arms, cold despite growing up in a kingdom of ice, despite being a water bender, despite the warm sun slipping over the horizon.

“I dream of him, sometimes.” Hinata says to her future master—the deadly fan warrior princess who couldn’t teach her until Tenten had, until Sakura.

“Of the boy in the ice?” They didn’t know his name.

“It’s… wrong.” Hinata pieced together slowly. “That he died so far… not ‘away from home’, but… so deep underwater. So cut off from the sky, I suppose. He had only his own breath for…”

Temari shuddered.

“An airbender suffocating like that….” She sighed. “A sandstorm is one thing, you know? But that, so cold, and trapped for so long… Yes. It’s _wrong_.”

Her eyes landed on Hinata.

Hinata had to believe he wasn’t awake for it. That he wasn’t _aware_ in any significant way, because otherwise she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, haunted by the idea of the cold and the dark and the achingly lonely helplessness.

Literally haunted, maybe, except the spirit he’d left behind was _her_.

It wasn’t a simple thing, to kill an Avatar.

They didn’t die easy.

If Hinata fell from the cliff they sat on, the waterbender would know fear, but reach for the sea anyway. It was instinct, a fundamental urge. The thing she had _become_—

No.

As the Avatar, she would reach deep instead, touching spirit and memory. And spirit and memory would answer, reaching back, lifting her up with the breath of the world.

If Temari stepped off this ledge, she would fly.

Hinata wanted that ease, the confidence.

Maybe it would come with airbending, but something told her it was something else. Something more like the wary acceptance slipping between Sakura’s shoulders, letting her be herself—whoever that was. Something like the fearlessness in Tenten as she worked a blade, in forge and in battle. Something like the look in Shikamaru’s eyes when they had decided to run, when he first said the words.

Temari’s eyes landed on Hinata, and she smiled then. Her eyes were more pink that orange, as the rictus of color around them slowly edged to dusk.

“Airbenders wake with the wind.” Temari says, soft and only for her.

Hinata can’t look away. It’s abrupt, yes, and still gentle where it matters. Like the woman who leapt out of a sandstorm and put a blade to her throat a six months ago, whose calloused hand was nevertheless gentle on her arm.

Hinata can’t look away, and finally she manages sound.

“But doesn’t the wind blow whenever it wants?”

“Yes.” Said Temari, leaning in with a breath that raised every hair on Hinata’s arm. “It does.”

When Temari kisses Hinata, her eyes are purple with the first hint of stars.

_Air is the element of freedom_, she thought, when she could think at all. No wonder Temari’s bending had grown stronger every day they travelled farther from the desert.

She could feel the ground around her, a testament to the earthbending she and Tenten—however great a metalbender—had learned together, following the steps of giants under the earth.

She felt the moon pulling her blood and the sea below, as clearly as if the serf itself was lapping at her ankles instead. From Kushina she had learned to feel the blood rushing in the heart across from her, the background hum of their camp asleep, the life in every tree.

Temari pulled back and looked at her like a woman instead of a last hope, a warrior instead of a scared child, and for a moment her constant fears and uncertainty, the destiny looming over her like a sword, fell away.

Hinata had fled the Norther Water Tribe with Shikamaru instead of marrying him, had drowned an army instead of healing her own, has seen the sky entire spread out at her feet at this air temple. She’s traveled the _world_, in her quest to save it.

But it was leaning forward to kiss Temari again that felt like her first taste of freedom.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Astolat's gorgeous Victory Condition, a poem from the 'verse.
> 
> Will you ask to live?  
You will. You know you will.  
When the hand closes on your throat, when the ash thickens your breath, you will ask, and ask again—
> 
> What promises will you make, when your shining dome comes down, that you withheld to see it rise?  
Will you still value its bright curve, steel and stone, higher than a breath in freedom?  
What will you then want more than the unbound hand and the open mouth?  
Make ready your offers and your bargains. Breathe. Breathe now.


End file.
